I used to like this town.... Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but good-hearted and peacefu...l.... Now ... we've got the big money, the sharpshooters, the percentage workers, the fast dollar boys, the hoodlums out of New York and Chicago and Detroit--and Cleveland. We've got the flash restaurants and night clubs they run, and the hotels and apartment houses they own, and the grifters and con men and female bandits that live in them. The luxury trades, the pansy decorators, the Lesbian dress designers, the riff-raff of a big hardboiled city with no more personality than a paper cup.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Why don't you take a good look at yourself! What do you see?! A doctor, a scientist, a businessman? You see a scar-faced ex- con, ...a two-bit safecracker, a petty thief who don't know when he made the big time. Where do you come off to blast her! No matter what she's been, what she's done. She's a giant! And you wanna know why? Well, I'll tell ya. Because she sees something in you worth saving. If only one tenth of one percent of all the good in her could rub off on you, you'd be a giant too! But you're a midget! In your head, in your heart, in your whole makeup! You're a midget!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

She [Mae West] supplied much of her own dialogue and delivered it with enough eyeball-rolling suggestiveness to disguise the fact ...that she didn't really look very sexy, she just sounded it. Her style was innuendo con brio. Garbo's sensual appeal was based on the assumption that her personality was a castle with no drawbridge; a successful suitor would have to climb the ivy. With Mae West there was a highway to the front door.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Compared with men, it is probable that brutes neither attend to abstract characters, nor have associations by similarity. Their th...oughts probably pass from one concrete object to its habitual concrete successor far more uniformly than is the case with us. In other words, their associations of ideas are almost exclusively by contiguity. So far, however, as any brute might think by abstract characters instead of by association of con cretes, he would have to be admitted to be a reasoner in the true human sense. How far this may take place is quite uncertain.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

America's two most important intellectual forebears are conceivably Franklin and Emerson. Franklin, however, makes us a little une...asy. Poor Richard is at once too goody-goody and too worldly. He argues the prudential approach to life almost too well: he blends copybook morality with eighteenth-century realism; his is the philosophy of the main chance without the cushioning of the noble motive. The special quality in Franklin is that he foreshadowed, with his philistine counsel, what America was to become, while indicating, through his unflinching worldliness, what it would cease to be. The better, the more central, the more congenial spokesman was Emerson, whose gift for giving a special emphasis and elevation to words has offered us a method for sliding over or circumventing things; whose fine aphorisms are the ancestors, at times even the blood brothers, of our trademarks and slogans; whose own transcendental visions coagulated or curdled into a great variety of mystical con-games; and whose deep concern for ideas could be made a kind of evasion of realities. Unlike Poor Richard, Emerson doesn't show us up--nor for that matter, pin us down. He is genuinely great without being uncomfortably specific.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

In a word, the Roman lacked the humanitas (the sure sense of human values and of the part played by man in the universe) which mad...e the Greek civilization great. The Greek saw life steadily and saw it whole; the Roman saw it steadily, but his vision was strictly limited, and it did not occur to him to ask whether he saw life whole. He saw life in terms of action and action in terms of his own needs; he never attained by himself to con sciousness of the world of thought and to the vision of the ideals by which all right action must be governed. It is true and fortunate for posterity that he was inspired by Greek idealism to much of his greatest work, but in himself he remained the realist of the Western world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Just across the Green from the post office is the county jail, seldom occupied except by some backwoodsman who has been intemperat...e; the courthouse is under the same roof. The dog warden usually basks in the sunlight near the harness store or the post office, his golden badge polished bright.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Here also was made the novelty 'Chestnut Bell' which enjoyed unusual popularity during the gay nineties when every dandy jauntily ...wore one of the tiny bells on the lapel of his coat, and rang it whenever a story-teller offered a 'chestnut.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »